Conferencia Bibliotecas Públicas 2018

Today a group of our student makers and librarians had the great honour of presenting at the Public Library Conference, which is taking place at the National Theatre in downtown San Salvador this week.

This conference runs over several days and brings together librarians from all over the country to engage in important discussions and share ideas.

Our presentation was a bit longer than we anticipated, but we were able to pack in everything we had planned on sharing.  We spoke first to the group about free,  innovation tools that everyone can access and use to document, promote and engage in creative, innovative design work in their libraries. We spoke about the various projects that run through LRC, including support of school activities and events, theme weeks and department liaisons.  We also took the opportunity to offer useful tips, and a resource bank for those interested in building creative initiatives in their institutions.

The highlight of the presentation however, for much of the audience and for us as members of staff, came about halfway through when  our students stood up to speak about their social impact projects. The audience was blown away by the thought and initiative that students employed in designing and implementing their projects. They were decidedly impressed, just as we are, by the dedication and passion they demonstrated about their work supporting the  UN SDGs.   This is the second time the students have presented this work, the first being the recent Library 2.0 Social Crisis online conference.


It is truly inspiring to work with these students as they actively search out opportunities, invest heavily of their time and effort, and engage themselves both emotionally and academically in the practical implementation of their school values, in their quests to think globally and act locally.

Here is the link to the photos on Flickr including a short tutorial for attendees on how to build plastic bag sleeping mats for the homeless. 

STEAM Fest 2018

The event is open to students across Primary and Secondary and also includes winning projects from the 6th and 7th grade Science Fair. Special guests including schools and organisations around the country also attend as part of the STEAM Fest community outreach initiative. 

This year schools from as far away as Morazan and La Union are taking part along with schools from Santa Tecla and San Salvador.

The festivities kicked off at 7:30 this morning and ran until 12:20 pm. An innovative go-kart project was introduced this year. At 10:30 the access ramp next to the large pool was closed off and the races began.

The entire STEAM Fest event was streamed live on the ABC Facebook page.

 If you were unable to catch the live streams you can also them from the Facebook page. 

Here are a few pictures from Thursday evening when the STEAM Team and
Crew set up the Auditorium with the help of our wonderful maintenance people.

Click here to view all the media from the event.

Building STEAM Momentum

We Launched our 3rd annual STEAM Fest this week with a short Animoto teaser.

We love Animoto and have so or year. It lets us create short, dynamic videos on the go with a minimum of fuss.

Now that STEAM Fest has been launched we want to help our kids and possibly inspire them through weekly exposure to cool innovations from around the world. STEAM Fest is about innovating and solving problems and it is also empowering our kids, by providing the opportunities to dream, the tools and support to design, and often the materials with which to create and build their own innovations.


I would like to share our first Innovation Spotlight with you and ask that you encourage your children to not only dream but to discover ways to make those dreams reality through active learning experiences.

Please click here to view the video.

7th Grade Animation Work

7A and 7C have successfully completed their digital animation work for the year. They created their animations using digital cameras and tripods, webcams, and iPads. They were given the choice of  using the following techniques: Pixilation, Stop Motion, Paper Puppets and drawing.

Toki Line test, iStopMotion and Animation Desk were used to produce the animation footage, once the storyboarding was done. The videos were edited on iMovie on the iMacs.  They had a lot of fun working with new applications and and trying things out with the different techniques. They also got a chance to reinforce previous chromakey work with the green  and blue screens. Have a look at some of their finished videos.